By Vaidya Aiyer, VP of Enterprise AI · Published August 18, 2026
Continue reading: The Copilot You Already Have (Part 2) →
Every SAP customer I talk to fits one of three buckets: fully on S/4HANA, mid-migration running S/4 and ECC side by side, or haven't started and still on ECC.
Doesn't matter which one you are. Same problem. Not enough SAP resources. And it's getting worse, not better.
I was talking to a customer recently who's just starting their S/4 journey. Three ECC instances, running globally. Four year migration plan.
Here's their dilemma. Business requests on those ECC instances haven't slowed down. They can't tell the business to stop asking. But their best people, the ones who actually understand the landscape, need to be heads down on S/4. So who handles ECC? Same answer everywhere I go. Whoever's left, stretched across both.
That's not a one-off. CIO.com reported in April that the 2027 deadline is out of reach for most customers, especially larger companies running multiple ERP systems. That's this customer exactly.
Another conversation, different flavor of the same problem. This customer isn't short on hands. They've got offshore resources ready to build. What they don't have is enough functional people who can take a business ask and turn it into something a developer can actually build. That translation step, business requirement to spec, is the bottleneck. Precisely's 2026 SAP Automation survey found the skills gap is the single most-cited barrier to SAP automation adoption, at 46% of respondents. That role is in short supply everywhere right now.
Two different companies. Two different shapes of the same shortage.
The numbers back up what I'm hearing in every conversation. As of late 2024, only about 39% of SAP ECC customers had licensed S/4HANA, roughly 14,000 out of 35,000, according to SAP's own installed base data. Gartner reportedly projects around 17,000 customers still have to migrate. Other estimates put it even starker: over 60% of ECC customers, including large global retailers and manufacturers, haven't started their migration at all.
Everyone's racing to hit that 2027 deadline. That's pulling every available SAP resource into migration work. Right now. Not next year.
Meanwhile the requests don't stop. A simple report. A small tweak. A complex build. All of it lands on the same small group of people. Expensive. Stretched thin. No separate lane for the easy stuff.
And now add this: the same companies are also trying to prove ROI on AI. So the SAP backlog and the AI initiative are fighting for the same IT attention.
You already know what happens next.
The backlog grows. Requests sit long enough that by the time they're done, half of them don't even matter anymore. The business moved on. Or found a workaround. Or just stopped asking. That's not a productivity problem. That's lost trust between business and IT, one unanswered ticket at a time.
What if business users could just ask SAP directly? No ticket. No queue. Plain English, straight answer.
What if governance and security were just handled? IT doesn't have to think about who's seeing what.
What if it ran inside the infrastructure you already have? No rip and replace. No disruption.
This isn't a five-year fix. It's sitting right in front of every SAP customer I talk to, right now, solvable with what you already have.